The 10 Best Articles on Refugees and Migration 2/2018

January 16, 2018

Tales of migrants willing to risk their lives for the chance of reaching Europe and a better life, only to find closed doors and inhuman policies. A journey in 10 reads through dangerous routes, no asylum and forced returns.

2. The never-ending hell of Calais

Who knows what the migrants are expecting when they risk their lives during their crossing into France. Certainly not what they find once they arrive: in Paris, they are still sleeping out on the streets (asCharlotte Wilkins wrote for France24), while in Calais, evacuations and police raids are only making the situation worse: read thereport by Catrin Nye for BBC Two.

3. Death on the high seas

The Central Mediterranean route is the most lethal migratory route in the world, with thousands of migrants losing their lives in the attempt to cross the waters over the last few years. The story of the 9 victims of April 13, 2015, however, is a different one, with a complex, controversial court case, and it has been dubbed “jihad at sea”. ReadFiona Ehlers’s in-depth story for Spiegel.

4. No asylum in the UK

The crackdown on immigration in the UK continues: the Home Office has ordered British banks to performchecks on holders of all account holders (and tofreeze the accounts of illegal migrants). Meanwhile, there is no end to forced returns: the Guardian has revealed theplight of people facing deportation, as well as the stories ofPaulette Wilson, detained in an immigration centre after 50 years in the UK, andVietnamese teenager S, who came to the UK as a child victim of trafficking and spent years in enforced slavery cultivating cannabis plants, and is now being sent back to Vietnam, where he has no family.

5. The business of migration control in Spain

The good news is that someone is benefiting fromimmigration policies. The bad news is, that someone is not the migrants or Spanish citizens. As demonstrated byGonzalo Fanjul’s research for ODI, the business of migration control is huge (nearly 900 million euros over the last ten years), and the only ones to profit from it are the companies that run the machinery.

The Israeli government has called its 40,000 migrants from Africa “infiltrators” and has given them anultimatum: leave the country within 3 months (with a 3,500 dollar incentive) or face imprisonment. Many of them, however, would rather face going to prison than returning to their countries of origin. Read thearticle by Peter Beaumont in the Guardian.

8. Back to Nigeria

The last year has seen a spike in the number of the so-called “assisted voluntary returns” facilitated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Since January 2017, around 7,000 Nigerian nationals have been returned home, so to speak, from the Libyan hell. But their prospects in their country of origin remain grim, starting from a lack of jobs. Read thearticle by Siobhan O’Grady in the New York Times.

9. When deportation is a death sentence

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the USA are facing violence or even death in their countries of origin. What happens when they are forced back to the hell they have fled? Read the extraordinaryreport by Sarah Stillman in the New Yorker, as well as thearticle in the Economist about the decision to end “temporary protected status” for200.000 Salvadorans (in the same week the US State Department declared the countrytoo dangerous for travel).

10. What is happening to the Rohingya

The situation in Myanmar, what the United Nationshave called “a textbook case of ethnic cleansing” (but could more accurately be described as genocide) against the Rohingya minority – is getting worse. Thenews broke out last week that two journalists from Reuters are facing up to 14 years in prison under the colonial-era Official Secrets act, for acquiring “important secret papers” while covering the Rohingya crisis. To learn more on the events in Myanmar, read thisin-depth article in Irin News.Translation by Francesco Graziosi. Foto di copertina: European Commission DG Echo (CC BY-ND 2.0).